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I wasn’t going to write about the Moore / Burchill / transphobia storm. Partly because identity politics isn’t my thing and I try to write about what I know best. But, if I’m honest, more because I reckoned it wouldn’t be worth the hassle. I’m not a trolling blogger looking for link-bait and I’ve no wish accidentally to offend. I don’t think what I’ve got to say will get me on the wrong end of a Twitter-storm, but then I don’t suppose Owen Jones thought that either yet that’s what’s happened today.

It’s precisely because I don’t know a great deal about trans-sexual politics, though, that I’m going to put finger to keyboard. Because one of the things I’ve found most troubling about the past week’s online furore has been that my first instinct (and I don’t think I’m alone) is to say: I’m just not going to go anywhere near that issue. Trans-sexuality is to identity politics what the Arab-Israel conflict is to international relations. Better off hunkering down, let others bear the brunt.

But that’s wrong. It’s wrong first, because it’s cowardly. But it’s wrong also because, by omission, it contributes to the closing down of free speech and the exchange of ideas which should be the Internet’s greatest gift. The world of global connectedness instead becomes shrunken and atomised, with only the really thick-skinned or ideologically certain daring to venture forth. And a public political discourse dominated by thick-skinned ideologues isn’t one I relish.

I blog to share my thoughts. But I also blog to learn more when other people challenge what I think. (Besides I’ve probably read up more on this in the last five days than most subjects I write about.) So here goes…

1. Everyone’s different. Seems a bit obvious, vanilla-bland, but it’s my liberal starting point. My experience differs from yours, which differs from theirs. (That’s why, by the way, I don’t do identity politics: because it seems to divide way more than it unites.) So I’m not going to presume to know how or why a human being can feel so at war with their own body that the only solution they can ultimately see is to undergo surgery to transform it. That’s a level of emotional damage I can’t imagine; and it’s a damage largely done to them by a society which makes them feel too uncomfortable to be who they were born as; and that, I think, is a tragedy.

2. Everyone deserves respect. No, I can’t imagine what drives trans-sexuals to feel the way they feel or make the decisions they do. But that applies to lots of other people, too. So live and let live. Trans-sexuals should have the same human rights as I do. They should be free to marry who they choose, to work where they choose, to live where they choose: all without any attempt to clamp down on their liberty, either by the state or any other organisation or individual. They should be free to go about their daily lives without being subject to threat or to bullying or to anything that subdues their natural spirit. That’s not really so very much to ask, is it?

3. Everyone should understand a little more, shout a little less. As I understand the feminist debate – one which has been raging at least since Germaine Greer argued against a trans-sexual female academic being employed by a women-only college – it divides into two main camps. First, those who say you can only be a real women if you were born a woman, that you would only chose to become a woman later if you had been hoodwinked by gender-stereotypes into believing you’re what society has constructed to represent as womanhood. Secondly, those who say gender identity is not fixed at birth, but one which is the individual’s right to choose later in life, and that once chosen it is their identity by right. As the last few days has proven that debate isn’t going to go away. But in the meantime, there are real living human beings getting caught in the cross-fire, whether insulted for the sake of cheap controversy by Julie Burchill or being murdered around the world for the crime of being different.